Moose in the Machine

Beyond learning about and becoming acquainted with the many wonderful people and resources that the library has to offer, I’ve also begun to learn more about the Frost library’s philosophy. I had already known that Frost library was much more than a warehouse for books, and that it was a location for mild socializing and studying, but I had not realized how much the services it provides students diverge from what I had assumed a stereotypical library would. The scope of the library’s focus  isn’t simply limited to books and their importance, but is expanded to incorporate learning and the imparting knowledge through any medium a student finds useful to their education. This is expressed most emphatically though library staff who devote their time towards becoming experts in a vast array of fields, and research and publication techniques for the sake of students who might be in need of that assistance.

Archives are not something I’ve had the pleasure of exploring as much as I would have liked to throughout the year, but through this fellowship I’ve slowly become more acquainted with the criteria for the things that are stored within them and the kind of work the people working in the archives do. While talking to some of the archivist, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for how they are able to gather important historical documents within the archives and manipulate them to be useful for almost any historical project related to the college. I also hadn’t considered the politics and strategy that goes into the work archivist do. Until recently, I hadn’t thought about the power of deciding what documents are preserved and which ones are not. The archives are quite literally the greatest remedy to institutional memory that a college can have.

Although I feel like I’ve gotten a grasp on several important debates within the Digital Humanities and am beginning to form a working definition of what the Digital Humanities are, I would still greatly appreciate more information on the various techniques and areas of study that encompass it. Despite enjoying a very productive week of learning general knowledge about two areas of study that deeply interest me, I don’t feel significantly or substantively closer to finding an overlapping area of study that would allow me to expand my knowledge in both. While I have really enjoyed learning important events within the history of Amherst College that pertain to black students, and this topic would easily lend itself to research in the digital humanities, it would not allow me to focus on computer science or neuroscience to the degree that I want. Cognitive Science, which is an interdisciplinary field that is largely comprised of study in neuroscience and computer science, is what I intend to study in college, but after extensive searching this weak and reading into topics within this area that interest me, I’ve found that it exhibits little to no intersectionality my other topic of interest and does not lend itself as easily to study in the digital humanities… in fact, it doesn’t seem to lend itself to humanities at all (hopefully I’m proven wrong about this).

I am really looking forward to conducting a research project this summer. Not only because of the novelty of having the opportunity to do a research project (which I have little experience in), but because of the opportunity to explore a topic of MY interest which I am already passionate about. The biggest thing I hope to get from this summer, which I am already so appreciative to have gotten is the TIME to STUDY and LEARN about something of my choosing.

When we started this internship just over eight weeks ago, I had absolutely no idea what would be possible for us to accomplish. I’ll admit, I wasn’t very optimistic. As I’ve said before on the blog, I’ve never been a very digital person. When my mom told me I should learn to code, I learned how to make books instead. The moment my computer misbehaves, I call a tech-savvy friend to come save the day. I took this internship because I wanted to change this, and to develop new ways of thinking about research and scholarship, but I also brought with me a whole host of digital insecurities. I’m proud to say that, for me, our website represents a tremendous amounts of growth, and I’m excited to present the final result to the Amherst community.

Digital scholarship required me to be much more cognizant of my methods and how they affected the data and materials I was drawing from. Perhaps this was because I was using tools and methods that were previously unfamiliar to me, but during this summer I often found myself thinking critically about the ways in which  the tools and methods I was using to study and present my data and research shaped and directed our understanding of these materials and the arguments I drew from them. Though this is definitely something I’ve also done while working on more traditional written scholarship projects, it was more present in my mind when I started to work digitally.

Next year, I’m conducting on a major self-directed research project in New Delhi, India, and I’ll absolutely be taking the skills and methods I learned this summer with me. As my work will require quite a bit of travel and my physical resources will be limited, the ability to use digital methods for documenting and presenting my work will be hugely advantageous, and I’m excited to discover new applications of the skills we developed this summer.

To the next group of Digital Scholarship Summer Interns, your most valuable assets during the program will be your peers. Though you may each have (seemingly) disparate interests and project ideas, some of the most meaningful, thought-provoking moments for me this summer came from spontaneous brainstorming sessions amongst the four of us, and whenever I reached a sticking point, team members were there to help me regain the momentum I needed. A related note—don’t underestimate the power of the white boards in the Barker Room. Sometimes the best (or only) way to articulate messy research ideas and aspirations is through series of concept maps and diagrams, unintelligible to anyone but yourselves.

People are pleased by narratives. Finding a thread, no matter how fictitious, that ties together the chaos of the world into something comprehensible comforts us.

In our haste to tidy up the past, we often erase the uncertainties, the dead-ends and empty spaces, or else we simply hold them up as foils to our successes. Often this is unconscious rather than deliberate, but there are times, too, when it’s just simpler to succumb to the tidiness of romanticization.

I can’t even recall all the sparks and sprightly ideas that flitted through my mind throughout the summer, each one shining bright with the certainty it would be vital in the final project. There is much I dreamed of that never coalesced into reality, and that’s okay. The messiness of the process is not a byproduct of poor planning or sloppy navigation– it’s a crucial part of creation.

Of all the tools we studied and struggled with and implemented this summer, it is important to acknowledge that our own intellects and insights are such in their own right. Every misstep and detour and all that messiness strengthened them, giving them more practice at interpreting data, synthesizing resources, and being flexible in expectations.

All our deliverables and proofs of concept that linger, somewhere, on the web or our hard drives or on whiteboards soon to be erased, were vital in constructing Early Amherst– a website I am quite pleased to have had a part in creating– even if no visible trace of them rests in its posts and pages.

If I had to give one piece of advice to the interns next summer, it would be this: invest in your proofs of concept. Learn to love learning, if you don’t already, and get excited about exploring. For the first half of the summer, don’t be afraid to circle around cul-de-sacs and dally in dead ends. You’ll still be sharpening your tools and methodologies.

And for the second half, as your heart grows set on certain products, start small. Collect the data for a portion, test out your software, be prepared for multiple iterations. The flexibility you learned from your earlier messiness will serve you well.

In college, there often wasn’t time for messiness. It was easy to stick to the tried-and-true methods of essay production and late night studying. Like that narrative thread, the certainty of those methods was something you clung onto to navigate the chaos.

No matter how tenacious your grip, such a strategy isn’t tenable. We were encouraged to think of our website as a work in progress, as a large proof of concept, and that is perhaps the best way to view all endeavors. Perfection will paralyze you, and no matter how much you might wish to narrativize your past into a straight line, it’s all the zigzags that make things possible. Learning to be flexible, to accept failure, and to understand that most efficient isn’t always the same as most effective, are lessons I will take with me past this internship.

In a sense, this whole experience was a proof of concept– can I work well with a team, can I allocate my stamina for a seven hour day, can I plan and implement strategies for a long-term project?

I’m not sure how much DH will play a role in my future– I am perfectly amenable to it playing a large role– but I know the skills and ways of thinking I’ve developed will aid me in any endeavor. And perhaps that’s its own form of romanticization, another fictitious thread I’m trying to weave into my tapestry, but it does, in this moment, feel very true.

In any case, I can say with certainty that working with everyone, sharing learning and laughter, dancing between the abstract, the concrete, and the absurd– all of it has been an absolute joy. Thank you!

 

 

Between the Jones Library Archives and Special Collections and the Emily Dickinson Museum, a wealth of information brought early Amherst to life! We, as interns, have spent the past few weeks learning the importance of the digital; from important text analysis tools to the ethics of distribution. However, the value of analyzing source material in the physical form and in space cannot be underestimated.

Particularly striking about our visit to the Jones Library Special Collections was the John Lovell photography collection. Lovell (1825 – 1903) was a professional photographer who came to Amherst in 1856 and established the Amherst Picture Gallery, continuing a long history of College imagery and extending the two-decade old technology of modern photography to Western Massachusetts. Throughout his professional life at Amherst, he produced compelling images of the College architectural landscape of then (more) humble town of Amherst. The collection revealed gems I would not have searched for online such as the view of Main Street in the 1860s shown below. Stumbling into such gems can be a valuable addition to primary research in the digital form.

The visit to the Emily Dickinson Museum equally added more context to my investigation of early Amherst. Learning about Emily Dickinson’s connection to the College through her brother Austin, an Amherst College graduate whose involvement with the college extended beyond his graduation, and the social networks that existed around the mid-nineteenth century fleshed out the information I’ve gathered so far on the persons influential in the construction of Amherst College buildings and its guiding pillars.

While the value of digitally accessible sourcing is unquestionable, it need not come at the expense of analyzing physical copies and site visits. Both forms of primary sourcing work alongside each other to paint a holistic picture of spaces and stories in history. Thus, Lovell’s dusty prints and Dickinson’s remodelled bedroom made early Amherst come even more alive.

 

Today we took a field trip to the Jones Library Special Collections and the Emily Dickinson Museum as a means to expand our understanding of nineteenth century Amherst. This was really exciting, because not only did these excursions deepen our understanding of the historical context surrounding early Amherst, they also allowed us to break out of our everyday Barker Room-Frost Cafe-Archives routine, which definitely helped me to refocus and consider my work from different perspectives.

At the Jones, we looked at several photographs I hadn’t seen before, both of Amherst College and the town of Amherst. These we a huge help in my own mental visual and spatial reconstructions of Amherst. It was also exciting to hear Amanda speak about some of the photos and locations, because so much of her work and her contributions to our final project have to do with these spaces and the people that inhabited them. I’m really looking forward to interacting with her final product!

The Dickinson Museum was also inspiring. I’ve always been quite ashamed that in all my time at Amherst, I never once visited the Dickinson Homestead, but today, as an alumna, I finally made it! Immersing ourselves in two nineteenth-century spaces—the Homestead and the Evergreens—was an important exercise, I think, for two main reasons:

1.) It permitted us to consider (very approximately, of course) what life physically looked like and felt like during that time. Architecture and interior spaces are often such a central part of human experience, and being able to engage with these spaces gave me a better sense of the period we’re working on.

2.) The tour itself was informative, not only for its content, which was excellent, but also for its structure and style. During the tour, I thought a lot about our guide’s use of visual materials and interactivity, which engaged us in ways that went beyond a simple lecture might. The organization and the curation of the tour got me thinking again about how our viewers will interact with our projects, and what types of guiding and interactivity we might try to facilitate on the website.

This all comes at the perfect time, because we are starting to hit the final stretch (!) of the internship, and are really starting to dig into our respective components of the final project, so the look, structure, and organization of the website are definitely becoming very real considerations, which must be determined very, very soon.

There’s definitely lots to consider and process over the weekend, but I think that we’ll all be heading into next week with lots of new inspiration and momentum!

Currently, I’m most excited about the mini project centered around the original college library (If you’ve been following our internship at all over the past few weeks this probably comes as no surprise…). I’m interested in asking the following research questions: How do student-developed and institution-developed libraries differ in terms of subject matter and contents in the 1830s at Amherst? Are library collections during this time at the college consistent with the college curriculum, or not?

Seeking answers to these questions will elucidate the place of college libraries in the early intellectual environment at Amherst. With those questions and goals in mind, over the past few days, I’ve been examining potential primary sources for the project in the archives. These include: The 1833 College Library Catalogue (manuscript), the 1833-44 Alexandrian Society Library Catalogue (manuscript), and the 1821-36 Athenian Society Library Catalogue (print).

I specify whether or not these sources are printed or handwritten because this has substantively affected how I engage with them. The printed Athenian Library Catalogue is exceptionally user-friendly compared to the other two…it is completely legible, intuitively organized, and tallies the total number of books in each subject area in a nifty little table in the back. The other two catalogues are far more challenging. Since they’re handwritten, they were able to be expanded and corrected over time, making them more difficult to read and understand through crossed out areas, different hands, and different organizational styles, and the nineteenth century handwriting doesn’t help…

On top of that, each catalogue has a different way (or lack thereof) of organizing their books and presents a different set of information about the texts, which adds another layer of difficulty to the task of comparing the contents of the three libraries (this experience is certainly deepening my library-nerd love and appreciation for standardized call number systems like Dewey and LOC…). 

In essence, as I begin to tackle these materials, I’m having major flashbacks to the metadata workshop–if you’re not really deliberate and standardized about how you categorize/organize/structure metadata, it becomes really hard for future people to do anything with the piles of stuff you leave behind.

Then there is the problem of trying to impose categorization onto bodies of materials that were not organized by subject matter in the first place, like the college library, which is essentially a giant list with no discernible order. Some of the books have ambiguous titles or might fit in more than one category, and as the researcher, I must decide where these books fit. I am trying my best to be faithful to the categories already designated by the other nineteenth century catalogues, but in order to apply these categories to other materials that were originally uncategorized, I’ll have to be sure I understand what the categories meant back then.

Though the research and data collection methodologies here are posing quite a challenge so far, this is a project that I’m very excited about, and hope to produce compelling data visualizations from once I’ve been able to structure and compile the data. Hopefully, armed with my ever-deepening appreciation for metadata, I’ll be up for the challenge!

(and hopefully, as library practices have become far more standardized and metadata-focused, researchers of the future will have a less-difficult time working with the stuff that we leave behind!)